What’s the opposite of “socially constructed”?
Social constructs appear commonly in social justice conversations, especially around race, gender, and (increasingly) biological sex. Generally the people I see talking about this online seem to think that “socially constructed” means “fake” and moreover, “insubstantial.” A fake, insubstantial thing can be dismissed or ignored, but social constructs make up very important features of the world. Here I explore how they work, introduce some better opposites — natural, nonnegotiable, and nonarbitrary — and discuss how this applies to the politics of social construction.
What is a social construct?
The popular understanding of social construct is something that is “made up” through social beliefs, practices, traditions, etc — which isn’t a bad definition. But people tend to imagine that the opposite of “socially constructed” is “real” — and that’s where we get into trouble. Antiracists say that race is a social construct, and the Alt-Right counters that they support “race realism.” Feminists say that gender is a social construct, and anti-feminists point to genitals as proof that gender is real. Transfeminists say even the concept of biological sex is socially constructed, and any number of critics again point to genitals. See, they exist!
And of course they do.
There’s nothing about a social construct that says it shouldn’t interact with reality. A social construct that didn’t interact with reality would be useless. Since highly contentious examples make things harder to understand, I’ll lay aside race, sex, and gender for now. Let’s consider another social construct with very important implications for reality: President of the United States.
The President of the United States is a social construct. Unlike most social constructs, we can say exactly when, how, and by whom this social construct was introduced (and subsequently altered). Specific, individual human beings got together and said “we’ve made up this country and it should have a leader” (or something like that) and they defined, intentionally, what that should mean. There are specific but made-up rules about what a President is, how they behave, what they can do, and what it means to be presidential, and we all more or less understand them (even acknowledging disagreements). That is what it means to be a social construct.
The President of the United States is also real. Donald J. Trump is a real person who exists, and his actions as President of the United States have undeniable influence on reality. A social construct is not a fiction, but a way of creating meaning and shaping the social world that also itself emerges from the social world. People decided that the United States should exist, it should have a president, and that person should be Donald J. Trump. They could in any of those stages have defined the President of the United States totally differently or not at all — but since they did define it this way, there are very real, objectively observable facts that coincide with that constructed reality. Donald J. Trump really, objectively is the President of the United States. He has access to Air Force One, people call him “Mr. President,” and when he creates Executive Orders, it has a much greater impact on the world than when I do it.
The opposite of “socially constructed” can also be found in the decision to have a President of the United States rather than something else. Earlier in the Enlightenment, it was claimed that the monarch had a natural or divine right to be in charge of a country. When something is natural or divine, there is no sense trying to change it or even critique it. It’s not useful or even intelligible to criticize an earthquake. It’s bad, sure, but knowing that it’s bad doesn’t mean we can not have earthquakes. The natural and the divine are nonnegotiable. The king simply is the king. A king is also socially constructed, but he pretends to be natural or divine to avoid criticism. A president is openly socially constructed, acknowledging the potential for renegotiation. The office is just as powerful either way, and the head of state just as real. The opposite of socially constructed, then, is something like nonnegotiable. The opposite of socially constructed is, for reason of nature or God or anything else, nonarbitrary.
What separates social constructs from other stuff?
When you get into categorizing manifest objects like bodies, rather than complete fabrications like political offices, the distinction between the socially constructed part and the natural (or God-given, if you like) part is less intuitive. The question of what part of a thing’s being is tied up in how it is conceptualized and named appears in Juliet’s distress about Romeo’s construction as a Montegue (“a rose by any other name”). Through her, Shakespeare considers that the literal manifestation of a rose or a lover are in some ways distinct from their description and categorization. A rose could have been called something else. It could have had different cultural meanings. It would still have the same shape, color, and smell — yet the social construct intrudes even here, as the cultural meanings have inspired selective breeding which DID change the shape, color, and smell. Moreover, social meanings about features of a rose leads gardeners to interfere directly with the way roses look and grow. Is a rose in a garden more socially constructed than a wild rose?
One major criticism of the concept of social constructs is that it tends to devolve into “fashionable nonsense” (as Sokal & Bricmont put it). There are nonnegotiable features of the world, but we can only describe and conceptualize them through language and systems of categorization that are essentially arbitrary. It’s a good criticism. The unsolvedness and potential unsolveability of identifying the boundary between socially constructed and non-socially constructed is a serious issue. That said, there are clear cases.
All systems of categorization are social constructs. All of them. Ever.
Human beings invented every classification system ever. And I mean highly formalized and relatively stable ones like Linnean taxonomy and international borders as well as highly informal and contentious ones like “things that do or do not go on a pizza.” Social processes and human interests determine which differences matter enough to warrant a category boundary and which do not. Pineapple and tomato are both botanically fruits. Do they both go on a pizza? The lines between different orders of life and what things go on pizza are as imaginary as the lines between nations or races. They reference concrete, observable features of the world, but the precise location of the boundaries could have been otherwise (and indeed, they have moved). Linnaeus divided all life into only two kingdoms, animal and plant. Today there are six kingdoms. The construct of six kingdoms works better than two for what we need it, so we changed it. Mushrooms are now fungi, not plants — but their characteristics have not changed.
So what does this mean for race, gender, and sex?
Well, they’re all certainly social constructs because they’re all systems of classification. But this gets back to the problem of what we mean when we say “social construct.” The current popular understanding of “constructed” as an antonym to “real” creates easy opportunities to mess up regardless of which one we choose.
People who believe that race is natural or God-given must believe that if one race has an advantage, it is because of natural fitness or the will of God, and thus it cannot be changed and nobody is at fault. Thus it is just and right, and can only continue as it does. This is straightforwardly the logic of racism, and appears as the moral underpinning of colonialism, slavery, and eugenics. It is reappearing now in conjunction with white nationalism, and is inseparable from it. It is not possible to believe that race is natural in a way that isn’t racist, because this proposition combined with very real racial inequalities can lead only to the conclusion that powerful racial groups are innately better than less powerful ones.
Conversely, if we recognize that race is socially constructed but take “socially constructed” to mean “not real,” we end up with race denial. This ideology goes something like this: “There’s no such thing as race, so we can all stop talking about it! It was a malicious lie but now that we’ve seen through it, it can just disappear.” This is performative colorblindness, a pernicious ideology which serves to ignore and protect racism instead of acknowledging it. That isn’t much better, and some argue that it’s worse. A better understanding of race as a social construct is that race is both unnatural and real — that it has very real consequences in the world and also that the cultural traditions giving rise to these consequences can intelligibly be challenged and rewritten.
Similarly, people who believe that gender is natural or God-given (in the newer formulation, “gender realists”) conclude that “sexism” is just being realistic about the differences between men and women. If one gender enjoys an advantage over another, it is because of natural superiority or the will of God, and thus cannot be changed and nobody is at fault. This is the logic of patriarchy and as with the previous example, is inseparable from injustice. While feminism from the second wave has generally included the notion that gender is a social construct, some feminists (particularly “gender abolitionists”) have taken this to mean that gender is “not real” and has no social purpose, concluding that only genitals themselves divide men from women.
Critically, gender abolitionists (unlike their racial counterparts) do not deny the material consequences of gender. Both, however, share the idea that abolishing the construct will abolish the harm. The difference, then, may not be conceptual so much as developmental — a post-racial age has been declared, but a post-gender age is merely proposed. If so, a post-gender age would have the same effect as racial colorblindness. Both the “gender realists” and the “gender abolitionists” base their concepts of gender differences around genitals, typically rejecting the possibility of transgender legitimacy in the process. Other feminist concepts of gender align with an “unnatural and real” model. This says that gender has material consequences and important meanings but is nonetheless socially defined and can be rewritten to suit.
More recently, biological sex has started to come up as a social construct. At this point most people would agree that biological sex is natural (“biological” is right there in the name!), by which they usually mean that there are two non-overlapping sexes, male and female, and all others are anomalies (i.e. medical problems). It’s very easy for people to assume that biological sex is inherently natural because we think of it as being “about” our bodies (which are more or less natural) and because most people do fall into the concept of two non-overlapping sexes etc.
However, neither describing our bodies nor being mostly-true would make something necessarily not a social construct.
Race also describes our bodies, but it’s made up. Similarly, a significant majority of people in the world are Asian, white, or Black, but there is no natural logic in insisting that all others are merely diseased forms. Like with the other examples, though, we cannot simply dismiss biological sex (at least without instituting some better system). While the categorization system we call biological sex is in some sense arbitrary, it serves some pretty important functions. As a sex educator, the one that always stands out to me is helping people understand their reproductive capacities, options, and how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. If we simply ruled out all language of sex with no replacement, it would be really difficult to talk about the unmatched-pairing features of human reproduction!
And this brings us back to the most important feature of social constructs: we made them up, so we get to decide if they’re working. Identifying something as a social construct so often comes packaged with the implication that the thing is necessarily harmful or suspect, but all systems of categorization are social constructs and we can’t just stop categorizing things. We will keep recognizing the difference, in our own culture and time, between a door and a window. And that’s really okay. But we can engage critically with systems of categorization, identify where they are not serving us. We may decide that whole systems of categorization (virgin/non-virgin, for example) just don’t serve any useful function for our society anymore. Or we may decide that elements of a system are useful — such as the feature of the sex categorization system that facilitates talking about reproductive health — but not others, like the binarist feature that leads to intersex infants being subjected to genital mutilation.
